The present invention relates to a cooking board such as a cutting board, cheese board or cake rack, and, more particularly, to a sterilized cooking board which can keep its top portion in a sterilized state on a semipermanent base.
Since food is generally placed on a cooking board and is cut by a knife or the like, particular attention should be paid to sanitary conditions for the board.
The essential conditions for cooking boards include the water resisting property of the board's top portion, the proper hardness rigid but soft enough to prevent nicking or braking of a blade, a hard stained property and a lye free property. Cooking boards are made of a wooden material, such as Magnolia hypoleuca, gingko, willow, or hinoki (white cedar), or typically made of a synthesized material, such as nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR) or polyethylene butadiene rubber. Cuts are generally made on a cooking board and their number gradually increases as it is used, so that juices of food easily soak through the cuts into the board. With such juices as nutrition, bacteria are likely to breed and propagate. Many difficulties therefore arise in providing sanitized use of cooking boards, such as sufficient cleaning, sterilization, etc. to meet the proper sanitary control after actual use of the boards.
As a solution to this problem, there has been proposed a cooking board having an antibacterial ion containing zeolite (so-called antibacterial zeolite) kneaded therein which is highly safe for human bodies (refer to Unexamined Published Japanese utility Model Application Serial No. 62-201600).
Unlike conventionally used germicides or bactericide, an antibacterial zeolite is an excellent bactericide in that its antibacterial material will not be dissolved and come out or be vaporized, so that it hardly alters the taste of food or is hardly virulent. Further, the sterilized effect of the antibacterial material will last longer.
In processing this antibacterial zeolite into a cooking board, however, if it is simply kneaded in a resin such as polyethylene, a small amount of the antibacterial zeolite exists merely in a part of the surface of the cooking board to present the sterilization effect, but most of it is in the resin and does not contribute to the sterilization effect at all.